BlackBerry may have turned over design and manufacture of entry-level smartphones to Foxconn in a new five-year partnership but it is still the one designing its high-end devices. If recent rumours are to be believed, up next for the company are the all-touch Ontario and the QWERTY-keyboard Windermere. In fact, the former just made an appearance on Geekbench’ latest benchmarking suite but there are already signs that BlackBerry is already looking beyond as well .
BlackBerry is reportedly looking to use the octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8994 in its flagship devices in 2015. Built using a 20nm HKMG process, the new processor will reportedly use a 64-bit architecture and each of its eight cores will run at 2.5GHz. Other key characteristics could include:
- 1600MHz 4GB RAM LPDDR3 PoP
- 500MHz Adreno 430 GPU
- Pixel fill Rate 6Gpix / s
- Vertex 500Mtri / s
- OpenGL ES3.0, direct x11.1, OpenCL1.2
For now, keep this one squarely into the rumours category. Not only has the Snapdragon MSM8994 not yet been officially announced but BlackBerry has also hinted that Foxconn could end up designing its high-end smartphones as well. For now though, employees reportedly working on those projects are still forging ahead.
As impressive as those specifications sound today, it remains to be seen how such an octa-core BlackBerry smartphone will compare with its competition a year and a half from now. It’s likely that BlackBerry is not the only one considering this new processor for a future flagship device.
Source : N4BB